Apologies for the double post (also appears in general section). I wasn't sure what the ideal location would be for this query.

Shot a music video on Canon 5D MkII. It was low light. The settings were Monochrome, ISO 2000, 135 mm, F2.0, 1/30 sec.

While I can remove most of the grain using presets such as Remove Grain, Ramp Scatter etc in After Effects, I do lose some detail. The output file looks pretty good overall before I upload to YT but then the banding and some pixelation always comes back after upload. I am reluctant to increase the bitrate beyond 16 as I don't want folks to have stuttering issues during playback.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1lgwXqezKY

I am considering purchasing Neat Video but am wondering 2 things:
1) Is Neat Video likely to minimize the banding that appears in the video?
2) If you are working with a one shot video such as this, do you need to create multiple profiles from different sections of the video? Or, should I just pick one noisy spot for the whole 3-minute video, create one profile and go from there?

The problem of banding is usually caused by compression applied by the output codec OR by Youtube (who re-compresses the uploaded clips). The problem and a possible workaround is described in this page.

When you use Neat Video, you can of course reduce the noise but if you then upload the video to Youtube then it may get such a banding from Youtube's recompression, so it may be useful to leave some noise in the video or add some artificial noise to the cleaned video, just to make Youtube's encoder work a bit harder to avoid creating that banding.

Regarding your second question, it depends on whether the noise is very different in different sections of the clip. If it almost the same (visually you do not see much difference) then you can just instruct Neat Video to "Adapt to Changing Noise" (there is such an option in the Temporal section of Neat Video 4 filter settings). If the noise changes drastically then it may be better to split the clip into scenes and apply different instances of the filter (with different profiles/filter settings). If you are not sure, I recommend to try the above option first and if it not sufficient then to split the clip.

Hope this helps,
Vlad

Last edited by NVTeam on Thu Jan 21, 2016 4:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ok what you need to do is put your clip through virtualdub first with plugins msu color denoiser and deblocker.

you only need one instance of each, how ever you will need to find the right setting for the color.

after this what you will likely find is that when you go for the neatvideo denoiser, dont have the "front" ticked (cant remember what its called think its temporal) this will allow the area to be flattened a bit more.

you will also likely need to render in 10bit which ive always found to be ideal when dealing with banding

I just rendered twice, once for each of the following variants:
1) Adapt to changing noise
2) Leave noise to reduce banding.

The video looks perfect while rendering but as soon as it is done I can see the banding right there in Premiere. I changed the NeatVideo preferences to 16-bit from 32 as ultimately I will be exporting at 16 for YouTube.

I tried exporting from Premiere as uncompressed Apple ProRes but YouTube doesn't seem to like it - quite a bit of stuttering.

It's just bizarre how everything looks great in the viewer when I apply NeatVideo and during the render in Premiere but as soon as it has finished and I move around in the timeline, the banding is appearing again.

Vlad - Any suggestions for Go To settings to make the best of NeatVideo within Premiere?

As I wrote earlier, it may be useful to leave some more noise in the video or add some artificial noise to the cleaned video, just to make Youtube's encoder work a bit harder to avoid creating that banding.

You can leave some noise in the video by decreasing the noise reduction amount or by using the dedicated control available in the General tab (in Advanced mode): Mix with Original. If you set it to say 50% then the filtered video will be mixed with original noise one at 50/50 ratio, so at least 50% of that original noise will stay in the image. That may be sufficient to prevent Youtube from creating that banding.

Then you may want to play with that ratio to find the setting that provides (1) enough noise reduction yet (2) still allows to avoid banding created by Youtube codecs. So some experimentation is required there.

I applied the 50% mix and also the adapt to changing noise filter. Things are definitely looking better.

My biggest challenge is the first minute of the video which was shot in the window reflection. Would you suggest isolating this and applying higher intensity settings for this to try and deal with the pixelation and banding?

I have re-rendered and uploaded to be sure that the description of the settings I have used is accurate.

Each time I open Neat Video I cannot see the settings I previously used and I think this is because I hadn't saved them as a profile. I have now done this, however. And the above render was saved using the following temporal and spatial filters:

I recommend to try the following:
- build a new noise profile by selecting as large as possible area containing those compression blocks; choose the area with the most visible blocks;
- try to vary the temporal filter radius (increase and decrease it) and check preview in Neat Video window to see if the result becomes better;
- once that is optimized so you like the results, try to play with the Mix settings to find the value that is low enough to avoid banding from Youtube recompression and high enough to sufficiently reduce noise.